Last Friday night, popular new Main Street coffee house Muddy Waters held an open mic night featuring Geneseo professor Thomas Greenfield and two female students as his band.
The two girls, senior Alice Brunet and graduate student Brenna "Boo" McIntyre, played the acoustic guitar and acoustic bass, respectively.
Greenfield explained how he, Brunet and McIntyre began playing together after he had both of them as students. He went on to say that their makeshift band was "very informal" and they "just started playing together out on the green."
Following Greenfield's comment about the informality of their band, McIntyre explained that they practice about "once every four months for about a half an hour."
Greenfield kicked off the night by jokingly introducing himself, as well as Brunet and McIntyre, as "the band without a name."
The trio started out with an instrumental number and then dove right into what Greenfield referred to as their default number, "Blackberry Blossom."
In the song "Whiskey for Breakfast," Greenfield, Brunet and McIntyre dare to vocalize, singing "Lord preserve us / saints reject us / we're drinkin' whiskey for breakfast."
The trio covered a song by singer-songwriter Gillian Welch called "Witchita" in which Greenfield put his slide-guitar playing skills to use. Brunet and McIntyre also had significantly larger singing roles during this song.
The group also covered "Man of Constant Sorrow" from the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Johnny Cash's famous tune "Folsom Prison Blues" and Bob Dylan's "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere."
As faculty advisor of sorority Alpha Delta Epsilon, Greenfield wrote a song dedicated to his "sisters" entitled "I Look Good in Purple." Definitely a crowd favorite, the song prompted many laughs from the audience as Greenfield sang "sometimes I think I'm like a second dad / but I'm not payin' their tuition so it ain't that bad."
For the next number, Greenfield passed out sheets containing lyrics as well as a basket, saying that although he "doesn't charge tips, he solicits [them] aggressively," hoping to encourage the audience to "tip the Band," (i.e., Brunet and McIntyre).
Greenfield took out his banjo for the next song, calling it "a banjo thing," and then began a number called "A Matter of Life and Death," a Texas swing song, of a genre that he said was "popular for about three months, 10 years before I was born, in six states that I've never been in."
After a short break, Greenfield, Brunet and McIntyre returned, repeating a few previously played songs, presumably for the new audience members that were continually arriving, as well as a few new ones such as the original track "Vaguely" and an acoustic version of "You Shook Me All Night Long."
Two more crowd favorites in the second set were both Greenfield's original songs, "Poopin' in the Snow," about house-training his dog during the winter, and "Dirty Ol' Man," a humorous song that gained a round of laughs from the audience throughout its entirety.
The night finished, much to the dismay of a packed Muddy Waters, as the trio launched into a final instrumental number and Greenfield announced, "We still don't have a name for the band, we're just us."